18 October 2011 12:21 PM

Somewhere between the sublime and the ridiculous lies modern art

The distance between the sublime and the ridiculous is sometimes only that between one page in the newspaper and the next.

On the so called “art” pages of a national newspaper, I saw, on the right hand side, that famously glorious painting by Vermeer, The Lacemaker. It is a miraculous picture: the intricacy of the composition – the woman’s hands, her concentrated attention – matches the exquisite occupation, lace-making, in which the subject is engrossed.

On the opposite side of the open page there is something unspeakably banal called Double Runner by Joe Bradley, a preposterous geometric diagram in grey, blue and red which might have been produced by any youngster at the playgroup. It fetched a record price for the artist of £79,250.

How many times do we have to blow the whistle on this sort of rubbish in order to encourage the “artists” who churn it out to desist?

Let us get one thing clear: the stuff produced by such as Tracy Emin and Damien Hirst has nothing to do with art and everything to do with advertising and making money. Hirst buys a doll from a high street shop. He gets someone else to make a gigantic model of it and sells it to Saatchi for, what was it? a million quid. Or you see such atrocities as Gormley’s, Angel of the North, dangerously distracting motorists on a northern trunk road. I am reliably informed, by the way, that up north this monstrosity, this gargantuan specimen of sheer ugliness, is known as The Geordie Flasher.

A mile from where I live is the national sacred shrine to pseudery and bad taste called Tate Modern. And to think, this dump used to be a perfectly serviceable power station. It is full of what they call “installations” – such as a pretend artist’s workshop constructed, as a kid on Blue Peter might do, out of polystyrene. However, someone – as a joke? – had placed a real Coca Cola can on top of this pretentious nonsense: so naturally it had to be removed on account of its “inauthenticity.” But when everything is inauthentic, how do you make such a judgement? If all the money is counterfeit, how do we discern a real five pound note?

Well, it was in Tate Modern that I created my little bit of havoc – call it Mullen’s Disinstallation, if you like. I ignored the piles of junk lying around everywhere and the faces of the blundering tourists looking as if they were interested in “art.” I drew an attendant’s attention to a fire door: “Look at that magnificent installation of a fire door!” “Oh no, Sir” said the attendant, swiftly and politely correcting my great ignorance, “that’s not an art-work; it’s a real fire door.” But I persisted, “Oh do come off it! How can you pretend that a piece of construction so beautiful and finely wrought is not a work of art?” I began to walk up and down the room between the lines of trash, drawing other visitors’ attention to the fire door as I went: “Look at the exquisite line. The way that the handle is fixed on one side rather than the other. Notice the courageous bold lettering FIRE DOOR. Only a genius would have thought to do that lettering in red. Run the palm of your hand over the surface and feel the texture of the metal. Sense, if you will, the existential fire-doorishness of this fire door!”

In the end, I had to be restrained. The attendant called his colleague and they protested that I was “making a nuisance of myself.” I protested in return that, far from making a nuisance of myself, my mini-lecture was my own personal statement of artistic integrity; my very own installation in fact.

I must say, though, that that debauched tribute to modern taste, Tate Modern, does afford access to one supreme work of art. If you stand on the second floor landing and look out across the Thames, you can see St Paul’s Cathedral in all its glory.